


she used to be mine

by potato_writes



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fatherhood, Grief/Mourning, I'm so sorry everyone, Lots of it, Mentioned Suicide Attempt, Open to Interpretation, Past Character Death, after the war, listen I have no excuse for any of this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:28:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26235679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potato_writes/pseuds/potato_writes
Summary: He doesn't know if it's a blessing or a curse that their youngest girl is her mother's spitting image.On Tarth, Jaime tries to figure out his place in a world without Brienne.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 24
Kudos: 57





	she used to be mine

**Author's Note:**

> listen I am well aware there is literally no excuse for this. this is not what I think is going to happen in canon and the only reason I wrote it is because the idea wouldn't let go of me no matter how horrible and depressing it is. if this does happen in canon I will personally hunt down GRRM and punch him in the face. this literally made me cry while writing it so have tissues ready when you're reading because this one's going to hurt.
> 
> title from Waitress. if you listen to the song she used to be mine while reading this you can suffer even more because why not.
> 
> come yell at me on Tumblr as [potatothecat](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/potatothecat) because I honestly deserve it after this.

He doesn’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse that their youngest girl is her mother’s spitting image.

On the days that it’s a blessing, his memory of Brienne is either faint or kind, the imprint of her slight smile in his mind enough to fill him with warmth and send him out to the yard or the beach or the hills with his girls, enough to fuel his smiles as they frolic and play and laugh underneath the sun on an island surrounded by waters the colour of their mother’s eyes. On those days, he pulls them close late in the evening and tells them stories of their mother, of her fierce righteousness and the way she held a sword and how fiercely he loved her, back before it all went wrong. On those days, he sits with Lord Selwyn in the solar as they pass a flask back and forth and reminisce on the blue-eyed woman they both loved so much, sharing the stories that don’t hurt as much, that don’t cut as deeply.

On the days that it’s a curse, he asks Pod or Lord Selwyn to watch over his girls in a choked voice and shuts himself inside, lets the tears flow as he rages at the gods, demands to know why they took her from him. On those days, he opens the chest at the foot of his bed and pulls out the sword he never touches except on the worst days, the sword he gave to her all those years ago when love still seemed an impossibility between them. On those days, he doesn’t sleep, and instead wanders the halls late at night, little more than a ghost as he paces the length of every corner of the castle in a futile attempt to keep the dreams at bay, to keep her ghost from appearing in every direction he turns. 

He doesn’t let the girls see him on those days, doesn’t want them to see their father so broken, so alone. But the elder is him in almost every way, and most of those nights she creeps out of her room once she deems it has been too long, pads down the halls in bare feet until she finds whatever corner he’s pacing in now and tugs him back to bed with her small hand in his, guides him to his room and curls up beside him until the sun rises. She keeps the dreams at bay when she does, and so he never tells her off for being awake so late at night like he would on the better days, the easier days.

He wouldn’t do it on the good days, either. There are none of those.

When he first came to Tarth, still in shock with two young girls cradled in his arms, Lord Selwyn had warned him about growing too distant from his daughters while he mourned. “It’s my greatest regret regarding her,” the older lord had said, staring morosely down at the flask in his hands. “I left her alone in my grief and despair, neglected her until she forgot what love looked like for far too long. If you hadn’t shown her love for the brief while you were together, she might never have known it again.”

He does his best to take the Evenstar’s advice, and most days it’s not so bad. He loves his— _their_ —daughters, loves them all the more because they are partly her, and basks in their carefree natures and shining eyes. He could never abandon them to some cruel septa or any other harsh fate, could never let them go through what their mother did. 

The elder girl will never struggle with that, for she has all the beauty of him and his sister but without the cruelty that led to her aunt’s downfall. Her mother’s sapphire-blue eyes display a kindness she cannot have learned from him, with all his jagged edges and broken pieces, and she will lead well once her grandfather passes and leaves the isle to her. The younger girl has all her mother’s unfortunate looks and is burdened with his eyes as well, but he has never thrown that at her as he did at Brienne a lifetime ago. She is lively and eager and loved by all, and he will not hesitate to kill anyone who dares make her feel small or unlovable or lesser than her more beautiful sister. He loves her, will always love her, just as he will always love the mother she resembles so much.

The mother who is not here to watch her daughters grow up, who will never see them run through the shallows on the island she never returned to, who will never watch them pick up a sword or dance at a ball or walk down the aisle of a sept to get married or hold their children or become rulers and warriors in their own right, far in the distant future. She won’t grow old by his side, as they once promised when winter seemed so bleak and long and spring was a far-off dream. 

It has been seven years since Brienne died, and it never seems to get easier.

***

There are days when the hard days come from grief, and there are days when they come from guilt instead.

Those days that come from grief are easier, though not by very much. Those days are the ones when he can be comforted by his eldest girl pulling him back to bed, when Brienne’s ghost is in every corner and he keeps reaching for her but missing, remembering too late that she’s gone, she’s never going to return. Those days are endless pain, endless woe, but it merely stems from the hole in his life that Brienne once filled.

The days that come from guilt are the worst, because the grief and the loneliness are matched with hatred, fury that he let her die, that he sent her off into the world and risked her life so recklessly without considering how precious she truly was. Those days are the ones where he lies curled into a ball in his room, refusing to move or eat even when his eldest girl pleads with him to do so, to keep himself alive. Those days are the hardest for those around him, because those are the days they fear for him the most, where he is tailed constantly by servants or Pod or his children to make sure he doesn’t do anything too rash.

He doesn’t quite remember it, but there was an early day where, overwhelmed by grief and guilt and pain, so much pain, he walked out into the water and let it take him, would have drowned if the master-at-arms hadn’t pulled him out in time. For a long time after that day, the servants watched him with something like pity in his eyes.

“She would want you to live, Jaime,” Lord Selwyn tells him after this, his eyes sad and fierce all at once. “She wouldn’t want you to throw your life away like this. Your girls still have need of their father, do they not?”

So he lives, because Brienne would want him to. But he is a shell of his former self, even more so than when they took his hand from him. How can he truly live when she is gone?

On the guilty days, his youngest girl is what saves him. Sometimes she’ll drag him out to the yard and make him spar with her until his exhaustion wipes away the pain, or she’ll ask him to walk out to the beach with her and then shove him into the surf and race away, laughing as he sputters with rage and lunges after her and they tussle in the waves until she grows weary and he carries her back to Evenfall, her rapidly growing body still just small enough to be cradled in his arms. On the very worst of those days, she’ll curl up next to him and lay her head on his shoulder as her mother once did and ask for stories, of her mother or of his many adventures alone or of his siblings or one of the tales he used to make up for his brother when he was small and wanted to comfort the little boy no one else seemed to love. And he’ll start talking and continue until his voice goes hoarse, and then the tears come again and she wraps her small arms around him and soothes him like he used to when she was a babe screaming for a mother that would never return. Both of his girls crawl into bed with him on those nights, less for their own comfort and more for his. When he awakens in the morning with them on either side, the next weeks are easier. He can bear his grief for a while after that.

Part of him wonders if Brienne’s ghost is with them somehow, granting them the ability to know exactly what to do when he’s drowning from the weight of his grief, when he misses her so much he can barely move from the force of it all. It would be so very like her, to protect him from himself even though she is long dead, long gone. He almost smiles sometimes, when that thought strikes him.

The girls don’t miss their mother the same way he does, though they were too young to truly know her when she died. They miss the abstract idea of her, the idea of a tall, homely woman with beautiful eyes and a gentle touch who would soothe them when ill, comfort them when scared, tell them all the things their father and grandfather cannot. They know there is a hole in their lives, but have nothing more than his stories to fill it with. Often, he worries his stories are not enough, since they’ll never truly do Brienne justice. She was too marvellous, too complex to be summed up in a handful of words, in descriptions and actions and half-finished sentences.

What they miss most, though, his eldest tells him once, is how their mother would aid him. How he would smile more if she were around, how he would laugh and jape and be the lion he is in the stories he tells them. How his eyes would have a light in them all the time, rather than on rare occasions only, how he would not look so dead and tired on the hard days, how he would not be more ghost than man on the especially bad ones. “We want you to be happy,” she tells him, her brilliant blue eyes as expressive as her mother’s. “She would make you happy, if she was here.”

Brienne would make him happy, did so in the few years they bought together, the few years they carved out of war and winter. But Brienne isn’t here now, and he has forgotten what happiness feels like in the years she has been gone.

***

Only once does Lord Selwyn suggest fostering the girls somewhere else, to forge connections elsewhere in the Stormlands. War has torn this region apart more than anywhere but the Riverlands, and there is a political wisdom to what the Evenstar suggests. The wounds need to be stitched back together. This is just one of many ways to heal the Seven Kingdoms.

But he cannot abide the suggestion, cannot even hear Lord Selwyn out entirely when he begins to explain it. He rages and sobs in equal measure, roaring at his goodfather in an act reminiscent of the lion he used to be, a long time ago. “Please,” he begs at one point, tear-stained and despondent and terrified. “Don’t take them from me. Not my girls. They’re the last I have of her. I won’t lose them to. I _can’t._ ”

The subject never comes up again, but he does not forget. Every time a stranger comes to the Hall, he watches them with wary eyes, petrified that this one will take his daughters away from him, the last piece he has left of Brienne. He won’t stand for it. He won’t live if his girls are taken from him.

Someday they will have to leave him behind, he knows. They will grow up, become women and move about in the world. They will marry, become ladies or knights or both like their mother was, and they will leave him behind, leave their broken father at Evenfall once they outgrow their need for his comfort, for his familiarity.

His girls hate it when he speaks so despondently, both vehemently denying that they could ever outgrow their love for him. And maybe they won’t; they are so like Brienne, after all. But he can’t help his fear, his insecurity. There was a time he though Brienne would never leave him behind without her, too.

Perhaps then he will truly be the ghost of Evenfall, as the smallfolk have taken to calling him. His midnight wanderings grow more frequent as he ages, as his youngest becomes more and more like her mother in appearance, as his eldest takes after her even more in her kindness. He can no longer rest without her ghost appearing to him in dreams, nightmares and…other kinds both. He has never been strong, not since he lost Brienne, and he grows ever weaker as his grief consumes him slowly, eating away at his strength year after year until almost nothing is left. The maester whispers with Lord Selwyn and his girls constantly, and all four watch him with worry in their gazes and poorly-hidden fear lurking just behind it.

He hates to worry them, he really does. But it is so hard, too hard. Brienne would want him to live, but how can he do that when she is gone?

Years have passed, his girls are growing up, winter ended a long time ago. And he is alone, a once-proud lion reduced to a ghost of a man as he paces the halls of his wife’s castle, searching for a woman who is not there, who will never be there again.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry. I really am I swear.
> 
> no I have no idea what happened to Brienne or how things end up for Jaime. that's why this is open to interpretation. 
> 
> please know that no matter how much you hate this, I hate it more. apparently I am cursed with absolutely horrible ideas sometimes and have no choice but to write them before they consume me.


End file.
